August 15

Today we headed for Chicago.  As usual on travel days, we left about 06:00.  The trip was uneventful and took about seven hours, including a stop for breakfast along the way.  The only outstanding thing along the way was that I realized I had left my computer back in Cleveland.  The good news is that it's at Kitty's sister's house, and that we will be returning there anyway on our way back.

Once in Chicago, we checked into our hotel, the Tremont, just off Michigan Av.  We then went about a block to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch.  After lunch we walked along Michigan Ave. for several blocks looking at the nice stores.  About 15:00, we headed back to the hotel to take a break before meeting my niece for dinner.

About 17:00, we drove to Shannon, my niece's, apartment.  After a short visit there, and meeting her boyfriend, we headed off to a nearby Mexican restaurant.  We met some other friends of Shannon's there and had a good dinner.  Having lived in both Texas and Arizona, and having visited Mexico, I've had several different varieties of Mexican food.  But now, I can chalk up a new kind.  The food was very good, but just a different style.  Case in point, the seafood dishes, like the seafood enchiladas that I had, came with potato salad instead of the beans that you would expect with any Mexican dinner.

August 16

This morning, we met Shannon for breakfast.  We were going to Anne Sather's, which is a locally famous Swedish restaurant.  This restaurant has several locations, and the one we went to turned out to be closed on Tuesdays.  So we went a few miles to the next location, where we were served by a wonderful, older lady who did her job very efficiently and exactly.  She was as much a part of the attraction to the place as the food was.  One of their claims to fame are excellent cinnamon buns, which we all enjoyed.

After breakfast, we drove to the Navy Pier which is right in downtown Chicago.  This is a 3000-foot long pier which the Navy used during the world wars.  It has now been turned into an attraction, with amusement rides, tour boat dockage, shops and restaurants.  We went to the IMAX theater here and saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  This is the new remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which we had watched in the car the day before.  It was interesting to compare the two versions.  After the movie, we rode the huge Ferris wheel where we got an excellent view of downtown Chicago. 

Mid-afternoon. we headed off on the last leg of the trip, to Madison, WI, where my other niece, Rachel, lives.  This leg of the trip is familiar to Barb and I as it is part of the route we took on the motorcycle two years ago.  We got to Rachel's house about 16:00.  We visited and had a nice dinner there.

August 17

Rachel had to go to work some of the day today.  While she was gone, we did some things for her around the house, like clean up some of her landscaping, and putting a new belt on her clothes dryer.  Of course, the selfish motivation for fixing the dryer was the opportunity to do free laundry.

In the evening, we went to Cheeseburger In Paradise for dinner.  This is the first CIP I have been too.  We tried to go to one two years ago on the motorcycle trip, but it wasn't open when we got there.  Like their parent company, Outback Steakhouse, they are only open for dinner and not lunch.  This was the first Parrothead type of place we have been in a awhile and it felt good.  The food was good too.  I had a cheeseburger, of course, and it was great.  I have noticed that the states we have been in the last couple of weeks still let you make your own decisions about  how cooked your meat is, unlike several southern states.  They warn you on the menu about under-cooked food, but you can still get your burger rare if that's how you like it.

August 18

Today Bob and I tackled a bigger project in Rachel's house.  There is a bathroom in the basement which has needed the toilet replaced ever since she bought the house.  She had the new toilet, but the installation was not straight forward since the original was so old.  But with some chiseling, concrete drilling, silicone sealing, and base leveling, we had it working by the end of the day.  This should come in handy with as many as ten of us staying in the house this weekend.

Late in the afternoon, we were watching some thunderstorms developing.  I was sitting in the backyard enjoying a beverage, after finishing the toilet replacement, when I heard a loud siren start to wail.  Now, I know what sirens like that mean in Texas (tornados), but I wasn't sure about here in Wisconsin.  After it continued for a couple of minutes, I thought perhaps I should see what was going on.  As I got up to go in the house, the lady next door came out of her house saying "tornado coming, tornado coming".  So, it apparently means the same thing.  We turned on the TV inside and sure enough, we were under a tornado warning.  There had been a sighting about fifteen miles west of us, and the storms were moving our way.  We got a little rain and then it let up.  It looked on radar like the heaviest weather was going north and south of Madison proper.  We went outside to look around, and not far to the south, we could see a large storm moving west to east and clearly rotating as it went.  A bit later we heard on the TV about another tornado touching down southeast of Madison which did substantial damage and caused one death.  I'm pretty sure the clouds we were watching are what became that tornado. 

Shortly after the storms passed, one of Rachel's fellow lab workers and her boss joined us for dinner.  We had a nice dinner and played a word game called Taboo afterwards.

August 19

Everybody except Barb and I went garage sale hunting this morning.  As those of you who have been following our tale since the preparation stage know, garage sales are amongst my least favorite things.  So, we elected to stay at home.

The morning news today has been dominated by the coverage of the damage done by the tornado last night.   There was one death, about thirty homes destroyed, and a couple hundred more damaged.  The National Weather Service estimated that twenty-eight tornados touched down overall.  That's more than Wisconsin normally gets in a whole year.  The one that did the significant damage was a F4 or F5, only the third of that strength ever recorded in Wisconsin.

In the afternoon, we went to Mt. Horeb, WI, to the Mustard Museum.  The Mustard Museum is a personal collection of over 4000 kinds of mustard from all over the world.  There also is a store with hundreds of mustards for sale along with some cute mustard related souvenirs.  Our favorites were the collegiate items (pennants, t-shirts, license plate holders, etc.) from Poupon U.  While I'm not a big mustard fan, it was quite fun.

From Mt. Horeb, we went another twenty miles or so south to New Glarus, WI.  New Glarus is a Swiss settlement which has been built like an old Swiss town.  We visited a store that made it's own cheese and fudge and had some ice cream.  We bought some cheese there, then went next door to the butcher where we bought some brats for dinner tomorrow.  Then to the next shop for some pastries and bread.  It was a cute little town. 

For dinner, we had another Mexican food experience.  This one was more like what I am accustomed to, although some of their terminology was different.  For instance, if you got a burrito and wanted sauce over it, that was "cowboy style".  After dinner, we planned to go across the street to an ice cream shop.  There was a crosswalk with no traffic signal there, so the local merchants organization had installed holders on each side of the street with red flags on sticks.  There are about a dozen total, so you just grab one and wave it as you cross the street to make sure the drivers see you.  When we returned from the ice cream shop to get the car, all the flags had made it to our side.  So we all took one and crossed, thus balancing them out again. 

Last Friday, Radio Margaritaville, which can be heard on the Internet or Sirius Satellite, mentioned us on the air.  They do an hour long show on Friday afternoon, live from the Margaritaville Cafe in New Orleans.  We have met Brett Brown, the manager several times, and visited with him when we came through New Orleans in June.  Well, last Friday when this happened, we were on the road.  But, a friend of Rachel's was able to record it and we got a CD of it.  I wanted to put a link here so people could listen to it, but I can't figure out how to do it.

Late in the evening, niece Shannon and her boyfriend, Adam drove in from Chicago to spend the weekend with us.

August 20

This morning, we had a choice of entertainment.  While most of the group went out to garage sales again, Shannon, Adam, Mariah, Barb and I went to downtown Madison where there is a weekly farmer's market around the capitol.  All four streets surrounding the capitol were lined with booths selling all nature of produce, honey, cheese, meats, baked goods, and flowers.  Everything sold here must be a Wisconsin product.  One of the hot selling items was fresh cheese curds.  These are similar to a big curd from cottage cheese, although they are more solid and the good ones squeak when you chew them.

While downtown, we took the opportunity to go inside the Capitol building.  The Wisconsin capitol building was designed by the same guy who designed the capitol building in Washington, DC.  It looks very similar.  Supposedly, when it was built, they had to make a design change and shorten it by six feet so that it would not be taller than the federal capitol.

About 13:00, we all met up and went to a place called Ella's Deli for lunch.  This place looks like it was created by a Disney animator gone nuts.  There are all sorts of characters hanging from the ceiling which move along tracks and spin around.  Each table is a glass-topped box that has something going on inside of it.  Outside, there is a full-sized carousel which we rode after we ate. 

We spent the afternoon being lazy around the house, and in the evening we cooked the brats we bought yesterday, on the grille.  Rachel's boyfriend, Chris, got  home from a ten day fishing trip in Canada late in the evening. 

August 21

This morning we had bagels, fresh and still warm from the bagel factory down the street.  About noon, we headed off to the annual Corn Festival in Sun Prairie, about 25 miles east of Madison.  This is an excuse to eat lots of corn, and have a carnival and crafts fair.  We did our best to support the local corn growers.  We had a little pool amongst ourselves as to who could eat the most.  My brother and I tied at six ears each and split the pot.

When we got back to Rachel's house, Shannon and her boyfriend had to leave to drive back to Chicago.  After our goodbyes, my brother and I mounted the new bike roof rack that he got for his van.  We will be taking two bikes back to NY with us.  We were able to get the bikes mounted, and still attach the "turtle", a roof mounted box to carry luggage. 

For dinner, we went to downtown Madison again, just across from the Capitol to the Flatiron Bar & Grille.  We had a couple pitchers of beer and a nice dinner.

August 22

Monday morning, and we hit the road again.  We left Madison about 06:00, headed for Cleveland.  It was an uneventful drive, as they should be, and we arrived back at Babe's house mid afternoon.  I was finally reunited with my long-lost computer and gave it it's new battery.  I started catching up on computer things, which included reading some other cruiser's logs that we follow.  One is a boat named Irish Mist.  I had met Irish Mist in Newburgh, NY last June when I was there for my brother's retirement dinner.  He is doing the Great Circle route which takes you along the east coast, up the Hudson, through the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes, to Chicago, and then down the Mississippi to the Gulf and back around to where you started.  In Irish Mist's case, this is North Carolina.  Well, turns out Irish Mist was in Cleveland for three weeks while Jim, the captain, had gone home to NC to visit.  He returned to the boat and left Cleveland the same day we returned to Cleveland from Madison.  We drove right by the marina where he had been.  Small world.

August 23

We had a nice breakfast at home this morning and then headed out for the afternoon.  Our destination today is the Great Lakes Science Center, where we are going to see Body Worlds 2, an exhibit of human bodies and body parts that have been preserved via a plasticization process.  It's hard to explain without seeing it, but it basically results in plastic models in various poses which reveal the inner workings of the human body.  It really was very interesting and we spent a couple of hours there.  This exhibit is put on by a German company who does this work, and all the bodies were donated specifically for this purpose.  After we got home, we saw an article in the news that told about a similar show in Tampa, but it was done by a Chinese company who used unclaimed and/or unidentified bodies for their specimens. 

After viewing dead bodies for a couple of hours, we went across the parking lot to have a late lunch at a waterfront restaurant called Hornblower's.  We had a very nice meal, and a charming waitress named Mickey. 

Back at Babe's house, we relaxed and watched the sunset over Lake Erie from her backyard.  Tomorrow is another early morning.

August 24

On the road at 06:00 again.  We had a great day for traveling.  It was cool and clear.  We stopped for breakfast about an hour after we left, and we stopped for a late lunch about half an hour from Bob & Kitty's house.  I was anxious to get home to see how the cat had faired while we were gone.  Bob & Kitty's dog had gone to a kennel, and their cat was locked in a bathroom, while our cat had the run of the rest of the house.  When we got there, our cat was hiding under the bed in the room we are sleeping in.  It took a bit of coaxing to get him to come out, but he seemed no worse for the wear.  Now we are working on the three animals getting to know one another again.  It still seems that Bimmy is the one who doesn't want to be sociable.  He seems to be forgetting that he's the guest in the house.